As ideas developed, they abandoned infrared radiation to instead concentrate upon visible light. The concept originally was called an "optical maser". In 1958, Bell Labs filed a patent application for their proposed optical maser; and Schawlow and Townes submitted a manuscript of their theoretical calculations to the Physical Review, published that year in Volume 112, Issue No. 6.
Simultaneously, at Columbia University, graduate student Gordon Gould was working on a doctoral thesis about the energy levels of excited thallium.
1950-1959
Image Credit: Courtesy of the US Air ForceImage Caption: A scientist tests a laser at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.Era_date_from: 1957
The Jake Brake permits large trucks to descend long, steep grades at a controlled speed. It was the first practical mechanism for altering on demand the valve timing on a truck diesel engine, thereby converting the engine to a power absorbing machine. The modified engine can continue to power the truck in normal operation, allowing service brakes to remain cool for emergency situations. Invented by Clessie Lyle Cummins (1886-1968), this device (produced by the Jacobs manufacturing company since 1961) has contributed significantly to highway safety.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Wikipedia/Sierra Fournier (CC BY-SA 3.0)Image Caption: Jacobs Engine Brake Retarder ("Jake Brake")Era_date_from: 1957
1985
Frank Zybach, a tenant farmer and inventor living near Strasburg, Colorado, received a patent for a "Self-Propelled Sprinkling Irrigating Apparatus" on July 22, 1952.
The device used mobile towers to continuously move a pipeline in a circle around a pivot. Water was supplied through the pivot and distributed by sprinklers on the pipeline. Zybach formed a partnership with A.E. Trowbridge, an entrepreneur-businessman, in 1953 to manufacture center pivots in Columbus, Nebraska.
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Image Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture photoImage Caption: The Center Pivot Irrigator transformed agricultural production throughout the world.Era_date_from: 1952
1993
A variety of mechanical feeders, including drag-chain conveyors and rotary pocket feeders, historically have been used to volumetrically control the flow of fuel to coal pulverizers on power generators. Most power generation in the United States has relied on burning fossil fuels in steam boilers, with coal as the fuel of choice. By the 1920s, pulverized-firing (the burning in suspension of finely ground coal particles) evolved as means to more complete fuel combustion and higher system efficiencies and facilitated the use of larger boilers.
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Image Caption: Drawing from patent documents for Gravimetric Coal Feeder.Era_date_from: 1957
1995
A curious child who dissembled the clocks in her parent's home, Grace Hopper graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in mathematics and physics. She continued her education at Yale University by completing a masters and Ph.D. in mathematics. She then returned to Vassar to teach.
During World War II, Hopper joined the Navy and was sworn into the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943. After training, she was commissioned as a lieutenant and assigned to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project at Harvard University. She became the third person to program the Harvard Mark I computer.
From 1956 to 1993, the GE Re-entry Systems facility was home to thousands of engineers and technicians who solved the problem of vehicles successfully reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. As described by aerospace pioneer Theodore Von Karman, “ Reentry… is perhaps the most difficult problem one can imagine.” Whether it was the first operational reentry vehicle for the Atlas ICBM, the recovery of the first man-made object from orbit, or the first probe to enter Jupiter’s atmosphere, some of the most significant milestones in aerospace were accomplished by those working in this facility.
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Image Credit: Public Domain (Author's Choice)Image Caption: GE Re-entry SystemsEra_date_from: 1956
2007
The Dorton Arena was the first use of a cable-supported roof system in the world. Commissioned in 1949 by North Carolina State Fair manager J.S. Dorton, the new building was intended to be a livestock judging pavilion. Architect Matthew Nowicki (1910 - 1950) proposed a structure that included a pair of intersecting parabolic arches supported by slender columns around its perimeter with a network of wire cables that supported the saddle-shaped roof.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/Justin Doub (CC BY 2.0)Image Caption: Dorton ArenaEra_date_from: 1952
2002
Disney engineers designed this monorail system based on the system developed by Axel Wenner-Gren of the Alweg Company in Cologne, West Germany. Wenner-Gren ran his experimental monorail in 1952 on a level track, and when adopted by Disney in 1959, it was designed to simulate the terrain typical of urban transit. Opening in 1959, the system has been in continuous operation as a passenger service carrying an average of 340,000 passengers a year and logging 10,000 miles. The original trains were replaced in 1969 and a new fleet introduced in 1987 to upgrade the existing chassis.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/prayitno (CC BY 2.0)Image Caption: Disneyland Monorail SystemEra_date_from: 1959
1986
This is the first commercial, human-blood heat exchanger. Developed in 1957, it permitted a patient's body temperature to be safely and rapidly lowered during open heart surgery to any desired and precisely controlled hypothermic level, then during the conclusion of the operation rapidly rewarmed to normal. Prior to this, hypothermic surgery required hours of preoperative, hard-to-control, external emersion cooling and postoperative rewarming.
Its design was a cooperative development between researchers at the Duke University Medical Center led by Dr. Ivan W.
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Image Credit: Courtesy ASMEImage Caption: A disassembly of the Blood Heat ExchangerEra_date_from: 1957
1980
This is one of the three original 60-ton vessels by which the basic oxygen process (BOP) of steel making was introduced into this country from Austria, where it was invented. It heralded the first new technology in fifty years to become the basis of a major process for steel production throughout the world. In this process, a water-cooled lance injected a jet of high-purity oxygen into the bath of molten iron. Various chemical reactions produced a quality low-nitrogen steel at a ton-per-hour rate nearly three times that of the open hearth furnace.
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Image Credit: Courtesy ASMEImage Caption: Basic-Oxygen Steel Making VesselEra_date_from: 1955
1985
Innovations
